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Morpheus Data was our first sponsor at #CFD3 and, as is my custom before Tech Field Day events, I had done zero prep work on Morpheus. I had never heard of the firm, and as first-at-bat sponsors for #CFD3, they were facing 12 delegates full of energy and with decades of Information Technology experience between them. So how’d they do? I came away impressed. Let me tell you why: they have a heart for operations, and I’m an operations guy.

Morpheus Data – Background

I found Morpheus Data’s story pretty compelling when I read up on it later. The company started off more or less as an internal product inside a cost center of Bertram Capital, a private equity firm in the Bay Area. Now every company has a founding mythology, but Morpheus’s range true to me. Here, I’ll quote from their site:

Bertram Labs is a world-class team of software developers and ops professionals whose sole purpose is to rapidly implement IT solutions to fuel the growth of the Bertram portfolio. In 2010, that team needed a 100% infrastructure agnostic cloud management platform which would integrate with the DevOps tools they were using to develop and deploy applications for a range of customers on an unpredictable mix of heterogeneous infrastructure. Such a tool didn’t exist so Bertram Labs created their own solution…

Just that phrase right there -an unpredictable mix of heterogenous infrastructure- comprises the je nais se qua of my success as an 18 year IT Pro. Using ratified standards sent to us from on high by the greyhairs at the IETF & IEEE ivory towers, a competent IT Pro like myself can string together disparate hardware systems into something rational because most vendors sometimes follow those standards.

But it’s very hard work. It’s not cheap either. And that act -that integration of a Cisco PoE switch with an Aruba access point or an iSCSI storage array with a bunch of Dell servers- isn’t bringing much value to the business. Perhaps it would be different if IT Shops could just start over with a rational greenfield infrastructure design, but that’s rare in my experience because the needs of IT aren’t necessarily aligned with the needs of the business.

Morpheus Data says they grew out of that exact scenario, which is immediately familiar to me as an ops guy. I find that story pretty encouraging; an internal DevOps team working for a private equity firm was able to productize their in-house scripts & techniques and are now a separate company. Damn near inspiring!

So what are they selling?

It’s Glue, basically. But well-articulated & rational glue

Morpheus’ pitch is that their suite of products can take the pain out of managing & provisioning services from your stack of heterogenous stuff whether it’s on-premises, in one cloud, or several clouds. And by taking the pain out, you can move faster and bring more value to the business.

I’m not going to get into each product because frankly, I think they’re poorly named and not very exciting (Sharepoint-esque in a way: Analytics, Governance, Automation, Evolution, Integrations). But don’t let the naming confuse or dissaude you; it’s an exciting product and the pricing model is simple to understand.

Instead, let me describe to you what I saw during Morpheus’ Demo at #CFD:

Performance data from On-Premise virtualization servers running Hyper-V, VMware, and even Citrix’s XenServer all in one part of the Morpheus web-based portal

You can drill-down from each host to look at VM performance data too. Morpheus says they’re able to hook into both Hyper-V performance counters and VMware’s performance counters. That’s pretty awesome for a hetergeonous shop

Performance & controls over IaaS & PaaS instances in both Azure & AWS, again in the same screen

Menu-driven wizards that let you instantly provision a new virtual machine pre-configured for whatever service you want to run on it. Again -this could be done in the same tool and you can pick where you want it to go

Cost data from each public clouds

Rich RBAC controls, which is very important to me from a security & integrity standpoint

A composable role-based interface. Por ejemplo, you can let your dev team login to Morpheus and not worry about him or her offlining a .vhdx on a Hyper-V server

This chart from their website sums up their offering nicely in comparison with other vendors in this space.

Concluding Thoughts

I’ve worked in IT environments where purchasing has been less than most people would consider as rational. Indeed, I’ve worked at places where we had the very best equipment from multiple vendors, but nobody had the time or talent to integrate it all into a smooth & functional machine in service to the business.

Stepping back, the very nature of the integration puzzle has changed. I mentioned above that a competent IT Pro could stitch together infrastructure that used IETF, IEEE, w3c and other standards-based technologies. Indeed that’s been the story of my career.

But in 2018, the world’s moved on from that, for better and worse. The world’s moved on to proprietary Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and so I’ve moved with it, creating my own Powershell functions and Python scripts to interact with cloud-based APIs. You can do this too, given enough time & study.

But let’s be honest: it’s hard enough to manage & integrate a heteregenous stack of best-of-breed stuff on-premises. Now your boss comes to you and wants you to add some Azure services & Office 365. And then someone on the business side orders up some Lambdas in AWS, surprise! Or perhaps a distant IT group at your company just went and bought Cloudflare or Rackspace. If you’re still trying to solve standards-based puzzles of yesteryear, while learning how to develop scripts & tools for use in a world of proprietary APIs, you’re probably not bringing much value to the business.

And that’s where Morpheus sees itself slotting in nicely…they’ve done the hard work of integrating with both your legacy on-premises standards-based systems and the API-driven cloud ones, and they release new integrations ‘every two or three weeks.’ They even take requests, so if you’ve got a bespoke stack of stuff that doesn’t surface SNMP properly, you can propose Morpheus build an integration for it.

Sidenote: One of the more dev-focused delegates at #CFD3 criticized the prodcut as too ops-friendly (nobody cares to see all that stuff! he said), but I had to push back on him because details are important for ops teams, and Morpheus can surface an interface that’s safe for devs to use. And that’s why I say they’ve got a heart for operations teams.

On pricing: the products which again, have somewhat confusing names, at least offer simplified pricing. To get workload & ‘core features’ running on a VM in your datacenter, you’ll need to spend $25k to start. That seems high to me, but you’re essentially buying a DevOps integrator & engineer who can work 24/7 and doesn’t need health insurance or take vacation, which is pretty cool, and which helps you bring value to the business.

Disclosures

This blog post was written by me, Jeff Wilson, for publication on my blog, wilson.tech. I was not compensated by Morpheus Data to compose this blog post, and Morpheus did not see it prior to its publication. I learned about the Morpheus Data products during Cloud Field Day 3, an event for IT & Enterprise influencers that was held in April 2018 in Santa Clara California. The Gestalt IT group paid for my airfare, accomodations, and meals during the time I was in Santa Clara. Morpheus and other sponsors paid Gestalt IT to bring Delegate influencers like me to #CFD3

Morpheus Data shwag I took home

Cool stickers

A t-shirt

While scanning my kid’s birth certificate this AM, my mind wandered to Digital ID, x509 pki, and Facebook. Am I guilty of overthinking things a bit? Sure. But this time, I wrote a post about it.

Anyway, here is the child partition’s birth certificate with all the important bits obfuscated:

Just look at that thing. It’s beautiful…everything about my kid is right there on a single beautiful, crisp, official document:

Full Legal name

Home address

Birthday

The hospital he was born at

Various unique identifier numbers

Physical Description and birth weight

The physician who helped bring him into the world

Mom & Dad’s details, including where and when they were born

Embedded within the birth certificate is data about the authorities that issued it. Across the top blue banner is the highest authority: the State of California. Immediately below that (one might say almost chained to it), is in effect, the issuing or intermediate authority, the County of Los Angeles’ Registrar-Recorder’s office. The Seal of the County is visible in the background near the middle of the document and in the lower right corner. And of course the Great Seal of the State of California is in the lower left. Near the bottom of the document is a signature by the County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk (an elected office) that testifies to the document’s authenticity. And you can’t really see it here, but there’s a physical stamp on the document you can feel if you run your fingers over it that serves as, in effect, the fingerprint of the issuing authority. In fact, the whole document feels more like a crisp & clean $20 banknote than it does a piece of paper. There are ridges and subtle impressions all over this thing beautiful document signifying when my son came into the world!

With this single document, my child is entitled to the following:

He is automatically an American citizen

He is automatically a resident of the State of California

He can apply for and receive a United States Passport

He is entitled to attend public school at no cost

He is entitled, when of age, to legally work in this country, to vote, to marry, to serve in its armed forces, and to contribute to and receive various social benefits

The United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of a Child says that registering every child born is so important it is a human right. To borrow a term from my 80s self, this is pretty heavy stuff.

x509 PKI

How my son’s identity chains up to a trusted source

Now if you’re a technologist, like I am, some of the words above might have tickled your spidey senses. Certificate. Issuing or Intermediate Authority. Seals. Signatures. Chained. Stamps. Authenticity. Identity. Authority. We practitioners of technology are quite familiar with these terms and how they work in the digital world thanks to the Elders of the Internet who developed, over time, the standards we all depend on today for security & identity on the internet: x509 Public Key Infrastructure.

I think x509 PKI is one of the least appreciated yet most important systems ever designed by humans, more important even than the plumbing technologies on which the internet depends on today. x509 PKI is an incredibly elegant system that provides encryption over untrusted networks (the how), identifies with cryptographic certainty the parties involved in digital transactions (the who) and bundles it all up into a neat digital organization chart that anyone can inspect and look at any time (the what).

But x509 PKI is much more than just an elegant set of tech standards. It functions as a digital overlay of our existing, stable and analog identity system, which begins with the Birth Certificate issued to you when you are born and ends with a Death Certificate issued to your family when you die. In this way, x509 PKI is a profoundly democratic and empowering system that takes our real world identity system and makes it available to us over the world’s largest untrusted network, also known as the internet.

The problem is nobody knows that, nobody cares and even those who do aren’t entirely comfortable with extending it past the way it’s currently used.

Digital ID

We have a big problem on the internet today: all of us operating on the internet lack any sort of Digital ID that mirrors the real world identities that have been issued to us by our nation-states. Much of the angst and concern and outright abuse on the internet could be solved if we the people had a Digital ID that, built upon x509 PKI, cryptographically proved our identity during certain important transactions on the internet.

How would that work and what would my Digital ID look like? That’s the beauty of x509 PKI, part of this has already been solved: a Digital ID would overlay the way in which you are identified by government & legal systems in the real world. As to the form it would take? It could and should be as simple as a credit-card sized device issued to you by local authorities, which you own and care for, and which identifies you and chains up from the local issuing authority to your state/province or nation, just like the Birth Certificate my son was issued.

Having been issued a Digital ID along with a Birth Certificate, my son, once he was of age, would ideally have the choice of where and when to use his Digital ID on the internet. I say ideally because implementation of Digital ID is the fuzzy grey area problem that really needs to be solved in the public square. In my view, a Digital ID should not be required to use the internet (say to search it or read from it), but may be required by companies or institutions that provide services on the internet (such as posting information in a public forum in social media that requires real user names).

For instance, maybe a social media provider that requires users to post as themselves would require you to submit your Digital ID for verification. Public clouds might require your Digital ID whenever you make an assertion that you are who you say you are (such as when you ‘sign’ a digital PDF). You could use your Digital ID when you apply for a job online, or to digitally sign documents you own or any scripts or code you write**. It could be used for a lot of things, but it should be your choice when to use it, and ideally you’d have the right to revoke your Digital ID from any service you wish to part ways with.

Are there serious privacy and security concerns about Digital ID, even in my vision of it? Yes of course. I can’t present a solution for everything here, nor is it my job to. And I’m certain anarchist-techno-libertarians would fight to keep the internet fully anonymous, but I and a growing number of people aren’t happy with how those values have shaped the digital public commons we now collectively inhabit.

I am convinced existing democratic systems, with expert advice & counsel, could legislate a decent Digital ID system that maps most of the things I do online to my real-world identity and is owned by me and me alone. Moreover, I feel that there has been an incidental and favorable ‘split’ in how society uses the internet that suggests Digital ID could work to solve many of the problems. For instance, many people hardly use a browser or a PC at all anymore; their primary compute device is a mobile phone, and their only interface to the internet is the Facebook app. Many others are still using the internet as we’ve used it for the last 30 years: to search, find, and view information. Requiring a Digital ID to be used before posting information to the former would not necessarily mean it’s required while using the latter.

The problem is no one is having this conversation. Digital ID is not on the agenda anywhere in the west, and only India has embraced it at scale. That’s not only frustrating, it’s really dangerous because the only alternative to Digital ID is going to be something like China’s Firewall or outsourcing identity to a private corporation like…

Facebook

Facebook is in the crosshairs on multiple fronts, and rightly so in my view. The sheer scale of Facebook is incredible.

Let’s do a little thought experiment so we can appreciate the scale of this thing: imagine Facebook as an online society rather than a multinational corporation, Facebook is populated with 2 billion humans and overseen by about 17,000. At the top of this online nation-state is a C-suite, just like other corporations. The Chief Executive of this online society is Mark Zuckerberg. With him at the top are boards of directors, but Zuckerberg calls the shots in the Kingdom of Facebook.

Credit: mrscainsclass.com

The two billion residents of this online society labor without compensation for Facebook, creating then giving data to the giant for free. Every photograph, video, along with data on all the things the residents like and dislike and talk about, is given by the residents to the people who own the kingdom. No compensation is given back to the residents of this nation-state for their work, which means Facebook is historically somewhere between a mercantilist nation-state or a kingdom that extracts wealth from its residents/subjects.

In return, the Facebook nation-state publishes news, information, and photos/videos/posts from other friends and family who are resident in Facebook. Lately, Facebook is under fire because it does zero to authenticate whether the information its residents consume is genuine. More than that though, it freely makes available to anyone anywhere at any time tools that allow bad actors to reach out and influence any group or sub-group of its residents for pennies.

The other important thing about the Facebook kingdom is this: unlike the stodgy old democracies of the real world, the residents of the kingdom of Facebook have no vote or say in how this mercantilist society is run. In the kingdom that Facebook runs, people do not have rights and there is no rule of law. There is only rule by fiat, so the rules tend to follow that which is good for shareholders.

Government issued Digital ID would solve much of this problem. Facebook knows it and the US Government knows it. But there’s more than enough hubris and conceit in Facebook & Silicon Valley in general that you can bet in the next six to 12 months, someone in Silicon Valley will propose the outsourcing of Vital Records to private tech industry players. And because of our dysfunction in Washington, we’ll likely let them.

I don’t like that future and we should be having a conversation about Digital ID to forestall it from happening.

It’s been a hell of a few days here in the trenches of Information Technology in 2017. Where to begin?

Between explaining how this all works to concerned friends & family, answering my employer’s questions about our patching posture & status, and reading the news & analysis, I think it’s safe to say that WCry has been in my thoughts for every one of the last 72 hours, including the 24 hours of Mother’s Day and all the hours I spent in restless slumber.

Yes, that’s right. WCry was on my mind even as I celebrated Mother’s day for the three women I’m close to in my life who are mothers. Wow. Just wow.

Having had the chance to catch my breath, I’ve got some informed observations about this global incident from my perspective as an IT Pro. Why is WCry as interesting & novel as it is potent and effective in 2017? And is there any defense of an IT team one might make if their organization got pwned by WCry?

I contemplate both questions below.

WCry successfully chains a social engineering attack with a technical exploit resulting in automated organization pwnage
WCry begins as a social engineering/phishing attack on users in the place they love and hate by equal measure: their Inbox. Using Subject lines that draw the eye, the messages include malicious attachments. This facet of WCry is not new of course…..it’s routine and has been in IT for at least two decades.

How WannaCry works

Once the attachment is clicked, WCry pivots, unleashing an NSA-built cyberweapon upon the enterprise by scanning port 445 across the local /24, cycling through cached RDP accounts and calling special attention to SQL & Exchange services, presumably to price the ransom accordingly.

Then it encrypts. Nearly everything.

All of this from a single email opened by a gullible user.

This behavior -socially engineered attack on human meatbag + scan + pivot to the rest of the network- is also not novel, new or remarkable. In fact, security Pros call this behavior “moving laterally” through an enterprise and they usually talk about it being done from “jump box” or “beach head” that’s been compromised via social engineering. Typically, security pros will reserve those terms to describe the behavior of a skilled & hostile hacker meatbag intent on pwning a targeted organization.

Where WCry is novel is that it in effect automates the hacker out of the picture, making the whole org pwnage process way more efficient. This is Organization-crippling, self-replicating malware at scale. Think Sony Pictures 2014, applied everywhere automatically minus the North Korean hacker units at the keyboard.

The red Wcry “Ooops” message is both informative and visually impressive, which multiplies its influence beyond its victims
As these things go, I couldn’t help but be impressed with Wcry’s incredibly detailed and anxiety-inducing UI announcing a host’s Wcry infection:

This image, or some variant thereof, has appeared on everything from train station arrival/departure boards to manufacturing floor PCs to hospital MRIs to good old-fashioned desktop PCs in Russia’s Interior Ministry. The psychological effects of seeing this image on infected hardware, then seeing it again on popular social media sites, the evening news, and newspapers around the world over the last few days are hard to determine, but I know this: this had an effect on normal consumers and users of technology across the globe. Sitting on my lap Saturday, my four year old saw the image in my personal OneNote pastebin and asked me, “Daddy, is that an alarm? Why does it show a lock? Do you have key?”

What’s interesting is that while computer users saw this or a screensaver version of this image, in reality you could click past it or minimize it in some way. Yet images of this application have proliferated on Twitter, FaceTube and elsewhere. Ransomware used to just announce itself in the root of your file share or your c:\user\username\documents folder: now it poses for screen caps and cell phone pics which multiplies its effectiveness as a PsyOps weapon. By Saturday I was reading multiple articles in my iPad’s Apple News about how regular people could protect themselves from the ‘global cyberattack.’

Its function is not just about encrypting file shares like earlier ransomware campaigns, but about owning Enterprises
If my organization or any organization I was advising got hit by WCry, my gut feeling is that I wouldn’t feel secure about my Forest/Domain integrity until I burned it down and started over. Why? Well, big IT security organizations like Verizon’s Enterprise Security group typically don’t classify ransomware as a ‘data breach’ event. Yet, as we know, Wcry installs a Pulsar backdoor that enables persistent access in the future. This feels like a very effective escalation of what it means to be ransomed in modern IT organizations, so yeah, I wouldn’t feel secure until our forest/domain was burned to the ground.

It is the manifestation of a Snoverism : Today’s nation-state cyberweapon is tomorrow’s script-kiddie attack
I was listening to the father of Powershell, Jeff Snover once and he implanted yet another Snoverism in my brain. He said, paraphrasing here, that Today’s nation-state attack is tomorrow’s script-kiddie attack. What the what?

Jeff Snover, speaker of wisdom

Let’s unpack: the democratization of technology, the shift to agile, DevOps, and other development disciplines along with infrastructure automation has lead to a lot of great things being developed, released and consumed by users very quickly. In the consumer world this has been great -Alexa is always improving with new skills…Apple can release security patches rapidly, and FaceTube can instantly perform A/B testing on billions of people simultaneously. But not well understood by many is the fact that Enterprises and even individuals can harness these tools and techniques to instantly build and operate data systems globally, to get their product, whatever it may be, to market faster. The classic example of this is Shadow IT, wherein someone in your finance team purchases a few seats on Salesforce to get around the slow & plodding IT team.

I think Snover was observing that bad guys get the same benefits from modern technology techniques & the cloud as consumers and business users do.

And as I write this on Monday, what are we seeing? WCry is posted on GitHub and new variants are being created without the kill-switch/sandbox detection domain. Eternal Blue, the component of Wcry that exploits SMB1, was literally just a few months ago a specialized tool in the NSA’s cyber weapons arsenal. By tomorrow it will be available to any kid who wants it, or, even worse, as a push-button turn-key service anybody can employ against anybody else.

The democratization of technology means that no elite or special knowledge, techniques or tools are required to harness technology to some end. All you need is motive and motivation to do things at scale. This week, we learned that the democratization of technology is a huge double-edged sword.

It was blunted by a clever researcher for about $11
Again on the democratization of technology front, I find it fascinating that MalwareTech was able to blunt this attack by spending $11 of his own money to purchase the domain he found encoded in the output of his decompile. He’s the best example of what a can-do technologist can do, given the right amount of tools and freedom to pursue his craft.

It has laid bare the heavy costs of technical debt for which there is no obvious solution
Technical debt is a term used in software engineering circles and computer science curricula, but I also think it can and should apply to infrastructure thinking. What’s technical debt? Take it away Wikipedia:

Technical Debt is a metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor system design, software architecture, or software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered proper or complete. If the debt is not repaid, then it will keep on accumulating interest, making it hard to implement changes later on.

I can’t tell you how many times and at how many organizations I’ve seen this play out. Technical Debt, from an IT Pro’s perspective, can be the refusal to correct a misconfiguration of an important device upon which many services are dependent, or it can be a poorly-designed security regime that takes bad practice and cements it into formal process & habit, or it can be a refusal to give IT the necessary political cover & power to change bad practices or bad design into something durable and agile, or it can be refusing to patch your systems out of fear or a desire to kick the can down the road a bit.
Over time, efforts will be made to pay that technical debt down, but unless a conscious effort is made consistently to keep it low, technical debt eventually -inevitably- becomes just as crippling to an organization as credit card debt becomes to a consumer. Changes to IT systems that in other organizations are routine & easy become hard and difficult; and hard changes in other companies are close to impossible in yours.

This is a really bad place to be for an IT Pro, and now WCry made it even worse by exploiting organizations that have high technical debt, particularly as it relates to patching. Indeed, it’s almost as if the author of this malware understood at a basic fundamental level how much technical debt organizations in the real world carry.

There is no obvious solution to this. We can’t force people to use technology a certain way, or even to think of technology in a certain way. The point of going into business is to make money, not to build durable & secure and flexible technology systems, unless that is your business. Cloud services are the obvious answer, but they can’t do things like run MRI machines or interface with robots on the Nissan assembly line. At least not yet. And nobody wants regulation, but that’s a topic for another post.

It has shown how hard it is to maintain & patch systems that are in-use for more than a typical workday
If we ignore the way WCry rampaged through Russia, China and other places where properly licensing your software is considered optional, something else interesting emerges: the organizations that were hardest hit by Wcry were ones in which technology is likely in use beyond the standard 8 hour workday, which likely makes patching those technology systems all the more difficult.

While reporting on the NHS fiasco has zoomed in on the fact that the UK’s healthcare system had Windows XP widely deployed, I don’t think that tells the whole story, even if it’s true that 100% of NHS systems ran XP, it still doesn’t tell the whole story. I can easily see how patching in such environments could be difficult based on how much those systems are used. Hospitals and even out-patient facilities typically operate more than 8 hours a day; finding a slot of time in a given 24 hour period in which you can with the consent of the hospital, offline healthcare devices like MRI machines to update & reboot them is probably more difficult than it is in a company where systems are only required to be up between 7am and 6pm, for instance.

On and on down the list of Wcrypt’s corporate vicitms this pattern continues:

Nissan: factory controlled machines were infected with WCry. How easy is it to patch these systems amid what is surely a fast-paced, multi-shift, high-volume operating tempo?

German Train system: Literally computers that make the trains run on time have been hit by WCry. Trains and planes operate more than 8 hours a day, making them difficult to patch

Telefonica & Portugal Telecom: another infrastructure company that operates beyond a standard 8 hour day that got hit by WCry

I know banks & universities were hit as well, but they’re the exception that points at the rule emerging: Security is hard enough in an 8 hour a day organization. But it’s extra, extra hard when half of a 24 hour day, or even 2/3rds of a 24 hour day is off-limits for patching. Without well-understood processes, buy-in and support from management, discipline and focus on the part of a talented IT team, such high tempo operating environments will inevitably fall behind the security curve and be preyed upon by WCry and its successors.

It has demonstrated dramatically the perpetual tension between uptime, security and the incentives thereof for IT
This is similar to the patching-is-hard-in-high-tempo organizations claim, but focuses on IT incentives. For the first 2o or 30 years of Information Technology, our collective goal and mission in life was to create, build and maintain business systems that have as much uptime as possible. We call this ‘9s’ as in, “how many ya got?!?”, and it’s about the only useful objective measure by which management continues to sign our check.

Here, I’ll show you how it works:

IT Pro # 1: I got five 9s of uptime this month, that’s less than 26 seconds of unplanned downtime!

IT Pro #2:Still doesn’t touch my record in March of 2015, where I had six 9s (2.59 seconds of downtime) for this service!

Uptime is our raison d’etre, the thing we get paid to deliver the most. We do not get paid, in general, to practice our craft the right way, or the best practice way, per se. We certainly do not get paid to guard against science-fiction tales of security threats involving cyber-weapon worms that encrypt all our data.

We are paid to keep things up and running because, at the end of the day, we’re a cost center in the business. It takes a rare and unique and charismatic manager with support from the business to change that mindset, to get an organization beyond a place where it merely views IT as a cost-center and a place to call when things that are supposed to be up are down.

And that’s part of the reason why Wcry was so effective around the globe.

It has spawned a bunch of ignorant commentary from non-technical people who are outraged at Microsoft

Zeynep Tufecki, an outstanding scholar of good reputation studying the impact of technology on society wrote a piece in the NYT this weekend that had my blood boiling. Effectively, she blames Microsoft and incompetent IT teams for this mess:

First, companies like Microsoft should discard the idea that they can abandon people using older software. The money they made from these customers hasn’t expired; neither has their responsibility to fix defects. Besides, Microsoft is sitting on a cash hoard estimated at more than $100 billion (the result of how little tax modern corporations pay and how profitable it is to sell a dominant operating system under monopolistic dynamics with no liability for defects).

This is absurd on its face. She’s essentially arguing that software manufacturers extend warranties on software forever. She continues:

For example, Chromebooks and Apple’s iOS are structurally much more secure because they were designed from the ground up with security in mind, unlike Microsoft’s operating systems.

Tufecki, whom I really like and enjoy reading, is trolling us. 93% of Google’s handsets don’t run the latest Google OS, which means many people -close to a billion by my count- are, through now fault of their own, carrying around devices that aren’t up to date. Should they be supported forever too? And Apple’s iPhone, as much as I love it, can’t run an Assembly line that manufacturers cars nevermind coordinate an MRI machine.

Rubbish. Disappointed she wrote this.

For all the reasons above, Wcry is not the fault of Microsoft any more than it’s the fault of the element Copper. If anything, the fault for this lies in the way we think about and use technology as businesses and as individuals. Certainly, IT shares some of the blame in these organizations, but there are mitigating factors as I spoke about above.

Mostly, I lay the blame at the NSA for losing these damned things in the first place. If they can’t keep things secure, what hope do most IT shops have?

It has inspired at least one headline writer to say your data is safer with FaceTube than with your hospital
Again, more rubbish and uninformed nonsense from the normals. Sure, my data might be safer from third party hackers if I were to house it inside FaceTube, but then again, adtech companies might just buy that same dataset, anonymized, connect dots from that set to my online behavior dataset, and figure out who I really am. That’s FaceTube’s business, after all!

Imagine for a moment that you are an IT Professional charged with the care, feeding, and security of a classic Wide Area Network (WAN). Further, assume that, like any properly-designed WAN, your remote networks (whether MPLS or classic Hub-spoke) egress their internet connections directly, that is to say, internet traffic from remote networks isn’t back-hauled to your datacenter or HQ.

In such a scenario, you will need to have a list of each remote network’s public IP address and other pertinent details in order to manage routing and security at each branch. In my case, I needed up-to-date public IP address information in order to properly segment & report on internet traffic traversing our SSL/TLS proxy inspection service, Zscaler.

So how would you do this? An earlier version of myself, say 15 years ago, would respond this way:

I’d remote desktop to a node in each remote network, open up a browser window, and visit IPChicken.com.Then I’d carefully copy/paste the IP address details into my Excel document, and happy days! – Jeff, 15 years ago

Wrong answer, Jeff from 15 years ago! That’s bad practice, takes way too much time, involves using the cursed mouse, and is fraught with security risk because it involves browser use.

Fortunately, there is a much better, simpler, faster and more secure way to do this. Even better, it involves my favorite tool in the world, Powershell, as well as IPInfo.io, a web service that blows IPChicken.com out of the water.

Best of all, you can do it all without your hands ever leaving your keyboard. Check it out

Let’s use Powershell’s invoke-webrequest cmdlet to see what IPInfo.io returns to us:

Nice! As you can see, IPInfo.io returns to us an HTTP content-type of application/json, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation.

JSON, if you’re not familiar with it, is an open standard that has superseded-in practice- XML and other structured document standards. It’s in widespread use across the internet, and it’s really great for us Windows admins that IPINfo.io feeds us a JSON response to our query. Why?

Because we’ve got Powershell to make it look pretty for us! We just need to pipe the results of the invoke-webrequest command into the handy convertfrom-json cmdlet. Voila!

This is great, now I’ve got high-quality IP Information on my workstation. So how do I scale this out to my remote WAN networks? how do I get the public IP address of my Lake Winnepesaukee branch office using Powershell?

Assuming you’ve got a Windows domain and have configured Windows Remote Management in a secure fashion, the way to do this is simple. Let’s use Powershell to tell a WIndows node at each branch to fetch us the public IP address it’s sitting behind, format it in a pretty way, and bring it back to my beautiful blue console. In fact, let’s do all the branches at once by using invoke-command:

Boom! That’s how we do it in 2017! It took less than 20 seconds to invoke our simple invoke-webrequest + convertfrom-json command across five remote hosts. No remote desktop needed….all of it done securely via secure WinRM which I’ve set up my nodes to listen for.

With these results in your console, it’d be trivially easy to dump out each WAN’s public IP information into a CSV, or, even better, create a new Excel spreadsheet using new-comobject and save/send the information from there.

Kudos to Intel for recognizing & implementing a full Powershell module for their network adapters.

This is probably old news to most of you (and indeed, I think this was released in 2013) but I’ve just now managed to explore them.

How do I love them? Let me count the ways.

With IntelNetCmdlets, you no longer have to fart around with netsh cmds to get your NICs primed to push packets properly

With IntelNetCmdlets, your Network Engineering colleague in the cube next to you will no longer laugh as you suffer from Restless Finger Syndrome. RFS is characterized by furious mouse clicking interspersed with curses such as, “Goddamnit, I don’t have time to hunt through all these Device Manager menus just to input the Receive Buffer values I want! And I have four adapters! Somebody kill me. Now!”

With IntelNetCmdlets, engineers who dabble in the virtual arts now have yet another tool in the box that can reduce/eliminate human error prior to the creation of an important virtual switch in a well-considered Hyper-V infrastructure.

With IntelNetCmdlets, even your beater lab environment shines a little brighter because these babies work with my favorite NIC of all time, the I350 T-4 quad port server adapter, which you can now buy brand new (Probably a Chinese knock-off…but the drivers work!) for about $70 on eBay. Suck on that Broadcom NetExtreme and goofy BroadcomCLI!

Here’s an example of what Intel’s Net cmdlets can do for you.

Let’s say you’re building out a host in your homelab, or you just received some new Whitebox x86 servers for a dev environment at work. Now, naturally this box is going to host virtual machines, and it’s likely those VMs will be on shared storage or will be resources in a new cluster…whatever the case, proper care & raising of your physical NICs at this stage in your infrastructure project not only sets you up for success and makes you a winner, but saves potentially hours or days of troubleshooting after you’ve abstracted all this nonsense away with your hypervisor.

Of course this could all be scripted out as part of a Config Mgr task sequence, but let’s not get too fancy here! I’m no MVP and I just want you to kill your need for Device Manager and the cryptic netsh commands, ok?

Gifcam demo time. Here I’m setting the Jumbo packet value in the Windows registry for the four Intel adapters on my I350-T4 card:

What I love about this is that Intel’s gone the extra-mile with their Netcmdlets. There’s a full Powershell helpfile, with extras if you tag -verbose or -examples to the end of your get-help query. Any setting you need to toggle, it’s there, from “Green Ethernet” to how many RSS queues you want, to whether VMQ is enabled or disabled.

All you need? A quality Intel card (the Pro1000 cards prior to the I350 family don’t support this officially, but you may be able to trick the Proset drivers into it!), the Proset driver package utility (here) and Powershell. Hell, you can even do this while PS Remoting!

What do you get when you take an IT Systems Engineer with more time on his hands than usual and an unfinished home project list that isn’t getting any shorter?

You get this:

My home automation/Internet of Things ‘play’

That’s right. I’ve stood-up some IP surveillance infrastructure at my home, not because I’m a creepy Big Brother type with a God-Complex, rather:

Once my 2.5 year old son figured out how to unlock the patio door and bolt outside, well, game over boys and girls….I needed some ‘insight’ and ‘visibility’ into the Child Partition’s whereabouts pronto and chasing him while he giggles is fun for only so long

My home is exposed on three sides to suburban streets, and it’s nice to be able to see what’s going on outside

I have creepy Big Brother tendences and/or God complex

I had rather simple rules for my home surveillance project:

IP cameras: ain’t no CCTV/600 lines of resolution here, I wanted IP so I could tie it into my enterprise home lab

Virtual DVR, not physical: Already have enough pieces of hardware with 16 cores, 128GB of RAM, and about 16TB of storage at home.

No Wifi, Ethernet only: Wifi from the camera itself was a non-starter for me because 1) while it makes getting video from the cameras easier, it limits where I can place them both from a power & signal strength perspective 2) Spectrum & bandwidth is limited & noisy at distance-friendly 2.4GhZ, wide & open at 5ghz, but 5 has half the range of 2.4. For those reasons, I went old-school: Cat5e, the Reliable Choice of Professionals Evereywhere

Active PoE: 802.3af as I already own about four PoE injectors and I’ve already run Cat5e all over the house

Endpoint agnostic:In the IP camera space, it’s tough to find an agnostic camera system that will work on any end-device with as little friction as possible. ONVIF is, I suppose, the closest “standard” to that, and I don’t even know what it entails. But I know what I have: Samsung GS6, iPhone 6, a Windows Tiered Storage box, four Hyper-V hosts, System Center, an XBox One and 100 megabit internet connection.

Directional, no omni-PTZ required: I could have saved money on at least one corner of my house by buying a domed, movable PTZ camera rather than use 2 directionals, but 1) this needed to work on any end-point and PTZ controls often don’t

And so, over the course of a few months, I picked up four of these babies:

Trendnet TV-IP310PI

Design

I liked these cameras from the start. They’re housed in a nice, heavyweight steel enclosure, have a hood to shade the lens and just feel solid and sturdy. Trendnet markets them as outdoor cameras, and I found no reason to dispute that.

My one complaint about these cameras is the rather finicky mount. The camera can rotate and pivot within the mount’s attachment system, but you need to be careful here as an ethernet cable (inside of a shroud) runs through the mount. Twist & rotate your camera too much, and you may tear your cable apart.

And while the mount itself is steel and needs only three screws to attach, the interior mechanism that allows you to move the camera once mounted is cheaper. It’s hard to describe and I didn’t take any pictures as I was cursing up a storm when I realized I almost snapped the cable, so just know this: be cognizant that you should be gentle with this thing as you mount it and then as you adjust it. You only have to do that once, so take your time.

Imaging and Performance:

Nighttime

Trendnet says the camera’s sensor & processing is capable of pushing out 1080p at 30 frames per second, but once you get into one of these systems, you’ll notice it can also do 2560×1440, or QHD resolutions. Most of the time, images and video off the camera are buttery smooth, and it’s great.

I’m not sharp enough on video and sensors to comment on color quality, whether F 1.2 on a camera like this means the same as it would on a still DSLR, or understand IR Lux, so let me just say this: These cameras produce really sharp, detailed and wide-enough (70 degrees) images for me, day or night. Color seems right too; my lawn is various hues of brown & green thanks to the heat and California drought, and my son’s colorful playthings that are scattered all over do in indeed remind me of a clown’s vomit. And at night, I can see far enough thanks to ambient light. Trendnet claims 100 foot IR-assisted viewing at night. I see no reason to dispute that.

Let the camera geeks geek out on teh camera; this is an enterprise tech blog, and I’ve already talked abou the hardware, so let’s dig into the software-defined & networking bits that make this expensive project worthwhile.

Power & Networking

These cameras couldn’t be easier to connect and configure, once you’ve got the power & cabling sorted out. The camera features a 10/100 ethernet port; on all four of my cameras, that connects to four of Trendnet’s own PoE injectors. All PoE injectors are inside my home; I’d rather extend ethernet with power than put a fragile PoE device outside. The longest cable run is approximately 75′, well within the spec. Not much more to say here other than Trendnet claims the cameras will use 5 watts maximum, and that’s probably at night when the IR sensors are on.

From each injector, a data cable connects to a switch. In my lab, I’ve got two enterprise-level switches.

One camera, the garage/driveway camera, is plugged into trunked, native vlan 410 port on my 2960s in the garage,

The other switch is a small CIsco SG-300 10p. The three other cameras connect to it. The SG-300 serves the role of access-layer switch and has a 3x1GbE port-channel back to the 2960s. This switch wasn’t getting used enough in my living room, so I moved it to my home office, where all ports are now used. Here’s my home lab environment, updated with cameras:

The Homelab as it stands today

Like any other IP cam, the Trendnet will obtain an IP off your DHCP server. Trendnet includes software with the camera that will help you find/provision the camera on your network, but I just saved a few minutes and looked in my DHCP table. As expected, the cameras all received a routable IP, DNS, NTP and other values from my DHCP.

Once I had the IP, it was off to the races:

Set DHCP reservation

Verify an A record was created DNS so I could refer to the cameras by names rather than IP

Trendnet is nice enough to include a fairly robust and rebadged version of Luxriot camera software, which has two primary components: Trendnet View Pro (Fat Client & Server app) and VMS Broacast server, an http server. Trendnet View Pro is a server-like application that you can install on your PC to view, control, and edit all your cameras. I say server-like because this is the free-version of the software, and it has the following limits:

Cannot run as a Windows Service

An account must be logged in to ‘keep it running’

You can install View Pro on as many PCs as you like, but only one is licensed to receive streaming video at a time

Upgrading the free software to a version that supports more simultaneously viewers is steep: $315 to be exact.

Smoking the airwaves with my beater kiosk PC in the kitchen. This is the TrendNet View client, limited to one viewer at a time

Naturally, I went looking for an alternative, but after dicking around with Zoneminder & VLC for awhile (both of which work but aren’t viewable on the XBox), I settled on VMS Broadcast server, the http component of the free software.

Just like View Pro, VMS Broadcast won’t run as a service, but, well, sysinternals!

So after deliberating a bit, I said screw it, and stood-up a Windows 8.1 Pro VM on a node in the garage. The VM is Domain-joined, which the Trendnet software ignored or didn’t flag, and I’ve provisioned 2 cores & 2GB of RAM to serve, compress, and redistribute the streams using the Trendnet fat client server piece as well as the VMS web server.

Client Side

On that same Windows 8.1 VM, I’ve enabled DLNA-sharing on VLAN 410, which is my trusted wireless & wired internal network. The thinking here was that I could redistribute via DLNA the four camera feeds into something the XBox One would be able to show on our family’s single 48″ LCD TV in the living room via the Media App. So far, no luck getting that to work, though IE on the XBox One will view and play all four feeds from the Trendnet web server, which for the purposes of this project, was good enough for me.

Additionally, I have a junker Lenovo laptop (Ideapad, 11″) that I’ve essentially built into a Kiosk PC for the kitchen/dining area, the busiest part of the house. This PC automatically logs in, opens the fat client and loads the file to view the four live feeds. And it does this all over wifi, giving instant home intel to my wife, mother-in-law, and myself as we go about our day.

Finally, both the iOS & Android devices in my house can successfully view the camera streams, not from the server, but directly (and annoyingly) from the cameras themselves.

The Impact of RTSP 1080p/30fps x 4 on Home Lab

I knew going into this that streaming live video from four quality cameras 24×7 would require some serious horsepower from my homelab, but I didn’t realize how much.

From the compute side of things, it was indeed alot. The Windows 8.1 VM is currently on Node2, a Xeon E3-1241v3 with 32GB of RAM.

Typically Node2’s physical CPU hovers around 8% utilization as it hosts about six VMs in total.

With the 8.1 VM serving up the streams as well as compressing them with a variable bit rate, the tax for this DIY Home surveillance project was steep: Node2’s CPU now averages 16% utilized, and I’ve seen it hit 30%. The VM itself is above 90% utilization.

More utilization = more worries about thermal as Node2 sits in the garage. In southern California. In the summertime.

Ambient air temperature in my garage over the last three weeks.

Node2’s average CPU temperature varies between 22c and 36c on any given warm day in the garage (ambient air is 21c – 36c). But with the 8.1 VM, Node2 has hit as high as 48c. Good thing I used some primo thermal paste!

All your Part 15 FCC Spectrum are belong to me, on channel 10 at least

From the network side, results have been interesting. First, my Meraki is a champ. The humble MR-18 802.11n access point doesn’t break a sweat streaming the broadcast feed from the VM to the Lenovo Kiosk laptop in the kitchen. Indeed, it sustains north of 21mb/s as this graph shows, without interrupting my mother in law’s consumption of TV broadcasts over wifi (separate SSID & VLAN, from the SiliconDust TV tuner), nor my wife’s Facebooking & Instagramming needs, nor my own tests with the Trendnet application which interfaces with the cameras directly.

Meraki’s analysis says that this makes the 2.4ghz spectrum in my area over 50% utilized, which probably frustrates my neighbors. Someday perhaps I’ll upgrade the laptop to a 5ghz radio.

vSwitch, the name of my Converged SCVMM switch, is showing anywhere from 2megabits to 20 megabits of Tx/Rx for the server VM. Pretty impressive performance for a software switch!

Storage-wise, I love that the Trendnets can mount an SMB share, and I’ve been saving snapshots of movement to one of the SMB shares on my WindowsSAN box.

I am also using Trendnet’s email alerting feature to take snapshots and email them to me whenever there’s motion in a given area. Which is happening a lot now as my 2 year old walks up to the cameras, smiles and says “Say cheeeese!”

So I was tooling around one day in the lab, reading Ivan Ristic’s book on SSL/TLS, when I came across his advice on securing Windows-based Infrastructures from offering up the use of out-of-date/obsolete or otherwise insecure cipher suites to hosts on the other end of an https connection.

I read Ristic’s chapter a couple of times, reviewed TechNet, and selected a set of cipher suites in Group Policy in the order I wanted them used, based largely on Ristic’s text, but with a few others I knew I’d need after the policy went live. Then I pushed out the new policy, named “Strong Crypto,” to all physical, virtual and laptops in my home lab.

A few gpupdates later, I was pleased to see that nothing was broken. Schannel wasn’t showing any errors, User & Computer accounts were authenticating and getting kerb tickets, and pleasantly, my Outlook fat client didn’t even hiccup; it happily was using TLS 1.2 cipher suites to talk with my Office 365 Exchange instance.

Happy dance.

And then, two days later, I noticed it. OneDrive for Business was busted, had gone Pear Shaped, and was now totally t***-up as my English friends would say.

A couple hundred gigabytes of files no longer syncing to my Sharepoint Online site, as evidenced by these Microsoft Icons of Distress:

So, what’d I break?

I’ll get to that in a moment, but first: why would you bother with something as obscure as cipher suites and their order? I mean beyond the fact that toggling the cipher suite sounds cool?

Why Cipher Suites are Important

Cipher suites are a critical part of your AD infrastructure. They’re critical as they represent a sort of baseline set of standards that client & server negotiate over during the complicated and very important tête à tête that is the TLS/SSL handshake between client/server.

You can and should read more about TLS handshakes in this RFC, but the bottom line is this: client & server are supposed to negotiate with each other, find the most secure and common set of cipher package, and use it during the secured session.

If client & server can’t find at least one common cipher suite, you have a busted TLS connection. And that’s no bueno,unless it was your intent.

In Microsoft-land, the default set of cipher suites is pretty good. Who am I kidding, it’s an acronym rich playground of security paradigms, as evidenced by the Group Policy editor:

Holy Acronym soup, batman!

Don’t be intimidated by all the crypto terms on this screen. What you see is the list of cipher suites -and the order in which they are presented to a host- by default.

The way to read one of these cipher suites is by breaking it down into its constituent parts:

So, the Cipher suite above uses TLS as its protocol (vs SSL), can exchange keys via the Elliptic Curve Diffie Helman ephemeral mechanism, accepts an RSA x.509 certificate, and is willing to encrypt the session via the AES 256 bit block cipher. The last bit, we’ll get to in a moment.

Be cautious when modifying

Since I was doing this in my lab, I had no concern about legacy applications, but in a production environment, you’ll want to tread lightly and deliberately here. Consider:

If your’e in a typical Microsoft IT shop, you probably have a few legacy applications hanging around that may rely on old cipher suites, or vice-versa, the application server can’t use the newer cipher suites that come built into your desktops & laptops.

Take Windows Server 2003, for example. The base OS doesn’t support Elliptic Curve Diffie Helman for Key Exchange, so right off the bat, if you’ve got 2003 Hosts serving up https Sharepoint or Exchange in-house, your clients & servers will never utilize TLS_ECDHE as that suite is not common to both of them. The contrary is also true; your Windows 8.1 laptop isn’t going to support the oldest suites that your 2003 server does; TLS_RSA_WITH_DES_CBC_SHA is never going to be the cipher suite watering hole your clients/servers meet around ((thank Goodness!!)) unless you go out of your way to make it happen.

The lesson here is that old cipher suites never die, dependency on them just fades away as your modernize/replace your legacy in-house applications with modern, streamlined, and properly TLS-secured ones. So be cautious, lest you break a legacy application.

You might be thinking I’m full of great advice, yet I still managed to wreck my OneDrive for Business sync app. And you’d be right!

So what happened?

Essentially, I broke my little OneDrive for Business sync app because I didn’t include SHA1 as possible hash algorithm in any of the cipher suites I selected.

By leaving SHA1 out of my cipher suites, OneDrive for Business couldn’t find common ground with Sharepoint Online, which broke my OneDrive Sync.

And SHA1 is used by Microsoft IT ((as a side note, it’s really awesome to see Microsoft IT’s PKI, built out as it should be. Here’s a PKI serving not just Microsoft internal employees -all 100k of them- but millions of customers. If Microsoft IT can build a PKI to that scale, surely you and I can build one for the users dependent on us!)) in at least two places: as the Signature Hash algorithm on the root certificate of my Sharepoint site, and as the hashing mechanism for the Thumbprint on *.sharepoint.com certificate.

Had I visited my Sharepoint site in IE, I would likely have seen an error message in my browser; but I use Opera normally, and Opera -like Chrome & Firefox- have cipher suites apart from Windows’ so I never saw an error.

Adding the strongest cipher suite that included SHA1 fixed the error right away. ((Interesting aside: Google, and many security researchers, consider SHA1 to be end-of-life as it is now, or will be very soon now, computationally feasible to crack it, if that’s the right word. Google wants to sunset SHA1 in its browser this year; Ivan Ristic’s site will give https sites that use SHA1 a D- rating by the end of 2015. Microsoft IT, meanwhile, still uses it in production, but plans to deprecate it at the end of 2016. What gives? You could say there’s a pissing match between these leviathans of technology, or that one is trying to screw the other. But in essence, all parties agree SHA1 should fade away, they just differ on how aggressive deprecation efforts should be.))